The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Seagate BarraCuda's average data rate on the Heavy test is lower than normal for mainstream TLC SATA drives. The Plextor M8V performs similarly, suggesting that the Toshiba 3D TLC NAND is a more important contributor to this poor performance than the aging Phison S10 controller that the BarraCuda uses. Overall performance from the BarraCuda doesn't suffer much when the test is run on a full drive, but that's also generally true of current-generation mainstream drives.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the BarraCuda are a bit on the high side, but the gap between the BarraCuda and the fastest SATA drives is less than a factor of two. More importantly, the BarraCuda is not a severe outlier even for the full-drive test run, and it does not appear that the BarraCuda suffers from any severe stuttering even under intense workloads.
The average read and write latencies for the BarraCuda aren't vastly slower than other mainstream drives, but the BarraCuda does rank near last place among its primary competitors, with write latency being a bit more of a problem than read latency.
The 99th percentile read latency from the BarraCuda is only slightly worse than other mainstream TLC drives, and fortunately much better than the Plextor M8V's score. The BarraCuda's 99th percentile write latency is worse off, with more than twice the latency of its primary competition.
The Seagate BarraCuda is more or less tied with the planar TLC-based OCZ Trion 150 for worse overall energy efficiency on the Heavy test, though the DRAMless Mushkin Source is so slow on the full-drive test run that its energy usage outstrips everything else.
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takeshi7 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
"they bought controller designer SandForce right around when SandForce drives disappeared from the market for good."That's not strictly true. Seagate still use controllers based on SandForce for some of their enterprise SSDs. Look for DuraWrite Technology in their marketing materials to know which ones.
The_Assimilator - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
SandForce disappeared from the *consumer* market, to be precise. And it was all the more surprising because of how much they shaped the formative years of mainstream SSDs. Reading about the reasons behind that company's implosion in someone's autobiography is going to be interesting.mikato - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I would like to know this also. Did the top brains get hired away to somewhere else somehow right when Seagate bought them or what?DanNeely - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
IIRC Rumor mill at the time was that their next gen controller wasn't competitive and unable to get the design wins they needed they ran out of money and got snapped up on the cheap.Qasar - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForceBeaver M. - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Nothing was surprising. Every expert knew they wouldnt last long with their focus on compressed performance and manufacturers promoting that without criticism.Many customers felt scammed when the controllers never delivered the performance they promised, because the real high numbers were only achievable with compressible content (who the hell has a 5 GB doc file?).
In every forum experts told people not to buy Sandforce SSDs or memory sticks, because of that fact. That sealed their fate.
HighTech4US - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Not competitive on price.$84.99 for the 500GB model.
I just purchased on Dec 4th a brand new Intel 545s 2.5" 512GB SATA III 64-Layer 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive SSD from Newegg for $34.99 (after $20 PayPal coupon)
Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
"after $20 PayPal coupon" So, Christmas offerings plus another coupon? Great comparison!HighTech4US - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
So show me where I can get the this 500GB model for $54..99 then. That was what I paid pre-coupon for the 512GB Intel SSD.Like I said Seagate is not competitive on price.
Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
I used a $50 Amazon gift certificate to get my Samsung SSD for $4.99. Seagate will never beat that price.(sarcasm)